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topicnews · August 29, 2024

GlassesUSA introduces “Pairfect Match AI” tool to assist with lens search

GlassesUSA introduces “Pairfect Match AI” tool to assist with lens search

GlassesUSA.com has come up with a new way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to give its customers personalized views of the company’s 10,000+ storage units – and see what they look like on the customer.

About 60% of the retailer’s eyewear catalog consists of exclusive designs from GlassesUSA.com, with the remaining 40% including popular brands like Ray-Ban, Oakley, Prada and Gucci. Consumers must figure out what size, fit and prescription they need, as well as what shape they prefer and what material they want the frames to be made of.

“Buying glasses online is not necessarily the easiest purchase you can make,” marketing director Arie Tom told Digital Commerce 360.

This is one of the reasons GlassesUSA.com has developed a new proprietary tool called Pairfect Match AI. The tool scans a customer’s face and measures various points, including jawline, pupil distance, hairline, skin tone, and nose bridge. It then matches the customer with lenses that match their face. GlassesUSA.com then presents the suggested glasses to the customer using augmented reality, too, so the customer can see how the frames would look on their own face.

Before this tool, Tom says, the process was different. A customer would go into a store and choose from hundreds of frames – even more when buying online – and see what fit their face shape, style preferences and other needs.

“The whole process is not ideal because it’s very manual,” Tom told Digital Commerce 360. “You have to look through so many frames and you don’t have to guess what fits your face, what looks good on you, and so on.”

GlassesUSA.com is a website owned and operated by Optimax, which was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Tel Aviv. Because the company is based in Israel, it is not listed in the top 1000 by Digital Commerce 360, a database that categorizes North America’s leading online retailers by annual web sales.

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Top 1,000 online retailers headquartered in North America. Access includes up to 5 years of web sales, company information, website traffic and features, technology vendor information, and more. Web sales range from $43 million to over $412 billion annually.

How the GlassesUSA Pairfect Match AI tool works

Consumers browsing GlassesUSA.com on their mobile phone have the option to scan their face using their device’s camera. And on both mobile and desktop, the Pairfect Match AI tool includes a quiz component that helps GlassesUSA determine a consumer’s preferences and desires.

It asks whether the consumer is looking for:

  • Glasses, sunglasses or both
  • Plastic/acetate, metal or any other frame materials
  • whether they prefer masculine, feminine or both styles
  • what color the frame should be, e.g. “dark, tortoiseshell”, “colorful” or “neutral, clear”

It then selects 10 matches that consumers can see on the website when they enter their email address. The tool also offers consumers the option to view additional results by automatically filtering the search results based on the results of the quiz and/or scan.

“The thing about glasses is that they are ultimately an accessory,” said Tom. “They are part fashion accessory, part medical device that improves your vision. And they are not a ‘one size fits all’ product. They fit our most important object: our face. They not only affect how you see the world, but also how the world sees you.”

GlassesUSA's Pairfect Match AI tool suggests eyeglass frames based on the consumer's preferences and facial structure.

GlassesUSA’s Pairfect Match AI tool suggests eyeglass frames based on the consumer’s preferences and facial structure.

GlassesUSA is also seeing fewer returns from customers who purchased frames after using the Pairfect Match AI tool, Tom said. That’s “the core of what we want to do. We want to make sure we’re providing customers with glasses that fit their face.”

When comparing users from the same traffic sources who do and do not use the tool, GlassesUSA found that those who use the tool are 9% less likely to return their frames than those who do not use it, Tom said. Likewise, the Pairfect Match AI tool helped acquire 12% more new customers from the same traffic sources, he added.

Generative AI is part of the next tool phase

AI is still new and exciting, Tom said, and experimenting with it and learning how it works has revealed possibilities that we “could only dream of” until a few years ago, he added.

The retailer’s website is an in-house development, Tom said. His team has invested more than half a million hours of development work over the years, he added.

“The vision,” he added, is for GlassesUSA to use conversational commerce to ask consumers about their budget, preferences, optical needs and more.

“In the next version, we will also embed generative AI and it will be much more conversational to really engage with customers,” Tom told Digital Commerce 360.

This element of conversational commerce would help GlassesUSA bridge the gap between buying glasses in an optician’s store and buying them online.

GlassesUSA.com improves order processing speed

Although GlassesUSA operates primarily online, it has physical stores in Boston, Long Island, New York, and Orlando, Florida.

Last year, the retailer opened a 37,000-square-foot optical lab in Atlanta. The facility serves as both a lab where GlassesUSA makes eyeglass frames to order and a fulfillment center.

And the lab is “fully robotic” until parts reach human hands for assembly.

“With every order, you see the robots driving around and picking up the lenses and frames, and finally, of course, there are the employees who do quality assurance. [quality assurance] and put the pieces together.”

And the robots use AI, too. In addition to the Pairfect Match AI tool, GlassesUSA uses artificial intelligence at its Atlanta facility to optimize inventory management and predict demand, helping to keep inventory levels efficient.

“We are putting a lot of resources and investments into improving all of our shipping methods to give customers who urgently need glasses the opportunity to receive them truly the next day through the new optical lab in Atlanta,” said Tom.

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